Tuesday, 21 January 2020
I had more maintenance work to do today - this time on the RV - and I wanted to go by the Ida B. Wells Museum that I'd missed yesterday.
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| today's route |
I crossed the Tallahatchie River, of Ode to Billy Joe fame. This bridge isn't the one in Bobbie Gentry's song, though. That one (until vandals burned it) was farther downriver near the tiny town of Money, where Emmett Till was lynched in 1955, helping spark the Civil Rights movement. The bridge I crossed has a historical marker that says it's where the Southern army retreating from Corinth set up a line of defense, intending to take on Grant's army again. But when Union cavalry coming from Arkansas surprised them on their west flank, they retreated still farther. (There's a lot of American history hanging around the rural state of Mississippi.)
At the village of Abbeville (pop. 412), I saw a large sign declaring it the home of Peggie and Jennifer Gillom. I had to look them up and learned that they were sisters who practically created the women's basketball program at Ole Miss in the mid-80s. This link gives a little more information on why the town's so proud of them and why Ole Miss named a gym after them. https://hottytoddy.com/gillom-sisters That "hotty toddy" business, by the way, is something unique to Ole Miss and apparently is used a little like "Hook 'Em Horns" or "Gig 'Em Aggies" is used. I saw references to it all over Oxford.
Oxford
I'd noticed my memory stirring when I heard the name of this town, and it turns out there are several reasons. It was the hometown of William Faulkner; it's currently the home of John Grisham; and most notably for football fans, it's the location of the University of Mississippi, known as "Ole Miss."
That school is itself memorable as being the place where in 1962, in defiance of a federal court ruling, the school refused to enroll James Meredith because he was black. When JFK secretly negotiated a deal with the governor to allow Meredith in, a race riot ensued. Three thousand white folks attacked the federal marshals and state highway patrol officers who were escorting Meredith to the school, pelting them with rocks, bricks, and gunfire. Two people were killed before the US Army and federalized MS National Guardsmen restored order.
The town is apparently much more peaceful and orderly today. There are about 24,000 residents here, and as far as I can tell this is 100% a college town. The little bit of the campus I saw is attractive - I'd have liked to drive around a bit but there were students everywhere and I really didn't know enough about the school to appreciate what I'd have seen and (more importantly) to not get lost.
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| Oxford City Hall |
I stumbled across the city hall and was surprised at the way it looks. In person it actually looks a lot older than this internet photo shows - very Gothic-looking. It's right across the street from a very unimpressive county courthouse.
After driving around town a bit, I went to the only place in the area that I found to sell me propane. It was a tiny business buried behind a Chevron station, that did auto repairs, rented out U-Hauls, and sold propane. There were 3 fat white guys sitting around an inner office and a thin black guy sitting in the outer office, and guess which one pumped the propane for me. Nice guy, though.
I drove back up the road, past the campground, to Holly Springs.
Holly Springs
A town of about 8,000, Holly Springs looks like a place of early prosperity that time has since passed on by. Rust College (since 1866), affiliated with the Methodist Church, is one of the oldest historically black colleges in the country. Tyson Drug (since 1857) and JC Levy (since 1858), "Store of Quality," are both located on the courthouse square.
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| Marshall County Courthouse |
Not without difficulty, I located the only place in the area that said they could change the oil in my RV (everybody else said their doors were too low to fit us inside). This place said no problem, they'd do it outside. I said did you notice it's not far above freezing? and they said they did a lot of their work outside anyway so I wouldn't be any different. And they did my oil change in the alley beside their office. An active alley, too, because while I sat there, several cars squeaked by me.
One man about my age stopped as his car passed us to ask about my Texas license plate and where I was going next. He told me he'd lived in Holly Springs all his life and in recent years he's been watching the nice old houses slowly sink into the ground, because it's so soggy here now. He told me the MS Delta, where I'm going next, is even soggier and that I'd find whole towns boarded up and half abandoned. Cheerful fellow with an uncheerful batch of information.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum
I can't remember now where I'd heard about her, but she seems to have been a remarkable woman and I wanted to find out more. The museum is in what's called the Spires Bolling House, built before the Civil War - possibly by Ida's father who was a carpenter for Spires Boling (different spelling is per Wikipedia), the owner of both the house and Mr. Wells and his family.
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| Spires Bolling House |
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| Ida B. Wells-Barnett |
This photo, which is the one most commonly used for her, gives no hint of the fire inside her for justice and equality. Her tongue was as sharp as her spirit, which cost her leadership positions and almost cost her her life. This link gives some detail about her life. https://en.wikipedia.org/Ida-B.-Wells
Not long after her parents died, she moved to Memphis, where she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the train; she won her lawsuit against the railroad only to have the TN Supreme Court overturn it. She taught public school until authorities discovered she'd written critical newspaper articles about the black schools in the segregated school system; they fired her.
In 1892, a friend of hers was lynched for not much more than being the black owner of a grocery store that the white owner of another grocery store believed was competition. Ms. Wells began investigating other lynchings and learned they often had an equally spurious rationale. She found one where a white father insisted that a white mob lynch a black man who was having a consensual sexual relationship with the man's daughter; he said it was to save his daughter's reputation. In response, Ms. Wells wrote an editorial for the paper she worked for that said:
Nobody ... believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men assault white women. If Southern white men are not careful they will over-reach themselves and a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.She was out of town when a white mob burned the newspaper office, and she instantly moved from Memphis to Chicago. The main Memphis newspaper ran the incident as a front page story and demanded "the black wretch who had written that foul lie" should be tied to a stake and publicly burned.
She challenged the claim by Southern whites that the only people who were lynched were criminals, and she did it with facts she uncovered by investigation. She saw lynching (correctly) as attempting to complete what the Civil War had tried to enshrine: the subjugation of black people to white people.
Throughout the 1920s she continued to campaign for the rights of blacks and of women, several times running unsuccessfully for political office; she continued these activities right up to her death by kidney cancer in 1931 at age 68 - and given her unpopular activities, it's remarkable she managed to live that long.
The museum also had an exhibit about slavery, explaining that all the cotton gin did was separate the seeds from the fiber. Farmers still needed a person to clear the fields, plant the cotton, tend the plants and pick the crop. By 1860, although most Southern farmers grew cotton, only 25% owned black people; most of that 25% owned as few as 2-4 people; only about 2,000 farmers in the South owned 100 or more enslaved people. Unsurprisingly, these elite were the ones with the most power and influence.
There was also an exhibit about the 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic that had taken Ms. Wells's parents and a brother. At that time no one knew the disease was spread by mosquitoes, which is how it became an epidemic.
More than 400 residents of Holly Springs died - far too many to dig separate graves for them. They were buried in 4 mass graves. Oddly, sometime during the 1970s a groundskeeper got tired of mowing up and down the mounds and leveled them. (I'm assuming doing that would have uncovered bones and it sounds a grisly process. And I'd say that groundskeeper needed a vacation.)
The museum's executive director, Rev. Leona Harris, and a volunteer were working at the museum when I was there, getting exhibits ready for an upcoming show, I think she said. In addition to the exhibits about Ms. Wells, the museum has a gallery of African and African-American art, a rotating display of art works by featured artists, and a genealogy room with information about local families. They have an annual festival and offer a number of other services to the area. It sounds like they're kept very busy.
I was frustrated because they don't allow photography there, and I mostly use photos as a supplement to my increasingly leaky memory. But when I said something to Rev. Harris about not being able to remember things any more, she corrected me - said it wasn't that I couldn't do something but that I found it challenging to do it. She said looking at things that way had been a big help to her and hoped it would be for me as well. Good idea.
I hadn't been able to fit the RV into their tiny parking area and there was no street parking, but I found a park behind the house and, after I left the museum, the dogs and I walked around there for a bit. Nice older part of town.
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